Hi, I'm Bowen Y.
Software engineer focused on AI agents, cloud infrastructure, and backend systems. I care about architecture decisions that hold up under real load, operational tradeoffs that are honest about cost, and systems that stay easy to reason about when things go wrong.
AI Agents
Orchestration, tool-use boundaries, retrieval quality, and failure handling. The gap between an impressive demo and a reliable production agent is mostly about how you handle the edges.
Cloud Infrastructure
Kubernetes, operators, Terraform, and deployment safety. My bias is toward boring reliability — systems that are easy to reason about at 2 a.m. and recover gracefully when they aren't.
Backend Systems
Throughput, latency, correctness, and maintainability in the same design conversation. Distributed systems, streaming pipelines, and the correctness problems that only surface at scale.
Featured Projects
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Blog
Architecture decisions, implementation tradeoffs, and engineering opinions from production experience.
Reading Series
A working engineer's read through every subsystem in the Claude Code source — 18 posts across 6 layers.
Projects
Case studies across infrastructure tooling, streaming platforms, distributed systems, and blockchain.
Architecture Lab
Interactive system flow maps tracing how components connect — from request ingestion to event fan-out.
API Design
Sequence diagrams and OpenAPI specs for common patterns: auth, trading, payments, URL shortening, fan-out.
Concepts
Definitions, tradeoffs, and comparisons for databases, messaging, distributed systems, and API protocols.
Cheatsheets
Idiomatic patterns for Python, Go, SQL, Git, and Docker — for engineers who know the language but forget the syntax.
Algorithms
Step-by-step visualizations of sorting, searching, and pointer techniques with complexity analysis and code.
Reading List
Books, papers, and talks that have shaped how I think about building software.